Tucked inside an unassuming brick building on the corner of 15th and Platte streets, My Brother’s Bar has been pouring drinks in one form or another since 1873, just 15 years after Denver itself was founded. Long before the neighborhood became a gateway to downtown, the space served as the Highland House, a boarding facility for Italian immigrants. It had a bar and restaurant, but Denver’s now-iconic wax-paper-wrapped burgers were still decades away.
Over the years, the building has worn many names—Schlitz Brewing Company, Whitie’s Restaurant, Platte Bar, Paul’s Place—and survived Prohibition by continuing to serve gin rickeys and old-fashioneds under the table. It became a favorite haunt of Beat poet Neal Cassady, whose signed 1944 IOU for a few dollars still hangs near the restrooms, a relic of a tab that most likely will never be settled.
By the 1960s, the bar had collected enough stories to rival any novel, including one mystery no one can quite explain. At some point, the building’s second floor simply vanished. “I’ve never found definitive data,” says current co-owner Dave Newman. “But, my understanding is that a fire in the mid-’50s destroyed the second floor and left it unsafe to rebuild. It gave us a rooftop instead, and I’ve always wondered if we could expand onto it. It could be great. Everyone loves a restaurant with rooftop seating.” What currently remains of the upstairs is the famously dubbed “stairway to nowhere,” a physical reminder that the history we don’t fully know is often the most fascinating.
The name My Brother’s Bar arrived in 1970, when Detroit transplants Jim and Angelo Karagas purchased the place. According to family lore, the moniker came from the brothers’ habit of dodging vendors: “Don’t look at me. It’s my brother’s bar.” The name stuck. A sign never did. That stubborn resistance to change became the bar’s quiet philosophy…